RUNWAY: Gucci FW15

There's been drama at Gucci of late. At the tailend of 2014, Kering announced that Frida Giannini, the creative director for almost a decade, and her partner in life and Gucci's CEO Patrizio di Marco were both leaving the Florentine company. Di Marco would leave January 1 and Giannini would leave after the women's collection in February. Fast forward to last week when Gucci unceremoniously asked Giannini to vacate her position. The collection she and the atelier at Gucci were working on? All scraped.

Today, the unveiling of Gucci's new aesthetic, under the new (presumed) head of Gucci, Alessandro Michele. The collection was put together in five days, a dizzying task for a big and important label like Gucci. The result was vastly different than Giannini's high life, high octane, and highly sexual narrative she (and her predecessor) trumpeted. Instead, FW15 was softer, more romantic and androgynous, featuring four female models in men's clothes. The collection will undoubtedly be polarizing, with lace tops, chiffon ribbon bows, and slinky tops, but the ability of the atelier to put together a collection this quickly and still showcase a degree of luxury (mink slippers, for example) is commendable and shows the might of its parent company. If Michele is the new creative director, then we'll save the final verdict after he has time to get his feet wet, or at least more than five days. If he's not, maybe Tom Ford really is returning, the soundtrack of his award-winning movie, A Single Man, was the soundtrack to the show, after all. Or that was a sly trick to get people's tongues wagging about the future and change the narrative over what transpired between Gucci and Giannini/di Marco. Only time will tell.